Susan Orlean

Twenty years ago, before she wrote The Orchid Thief or was hailed as "a national treasure" by The Washington Post, Susan Orlean was a journalist with a question: What makes Saturday night so special? To answer it, she embarked on a remarkable journey across the country and spent the evening with all sorts of people in all sorts of places—hipsters in Los Angeles, car cruisers in small-town Indiana, coeds in Boston, the homeless...

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and...

Literary journalist Orlean has been called "a kind of latter-day Tocqueville." In this unconventional travel book, she conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois--and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality. Readers will climb Mt. Fuji; play ball with Cuba's Little...

A behind-the-scenes look at the New York rare book world and the fascinating people who inhabit it.

Foreword by Susan Orlean
A charming facsimile edition of celebrated British illustrator Lucy Dawson’s 1937 classic collection of highly detailed and loveable drawings of dogs, complete with a cloth spine and ribbon marker—the companion volume to the acclaimed Dogs As I See Them.

Lucy Dawson, also known as "Mac," was a preeminent British illustrator in the 1930s and 1940s revered for her paintings and etchings

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"Moving, joyful, and insightful collection of conversations with today's living literary legends about the books that changed their lives, made them think, and brought them joy, from 'American's Librarian' Nancy Pearl and noted playwright Jeff Schwager"--